Synkroniciti is pleased to welcome back Philadelphia-based poet Alison Hicks with two contrasting poems. “Hill Reservoir” is an atmospheric piece set in nature, as the speaker goes for a winter walk with her father and the family dog on the last day of the year. Reaching the reservoir, she experiences a moment of palpable mutability, a fleeting space in time. “All the time we were standing there, breath fogging air,/ where we couldn’t see, water was moving,/ layers falling, rising, cooling, and dropping…” It’s an ordinary scene distilled into something remarkable, the gentle rhythm and sibilants of Alison’s verse creating a peaceful, resilient sense of the moment and the physical sensations that accompany it. “Teachers” explores human relationships and the way we regard the space between other people, particularly breaches of that space. A friend had a physical relationship with the high school French teacher who was fired years later for a similar relationship with another student. The narrator remembers her reaction while the attachment was going on, the way she, and perhaps others, kept the secret, “sealing an intimacy no one else could touch.// The way you might hold a coat for someone,/ until their arms are ready to slip through the sleeves.” The imagery is gentle and quiet, devoid of shame or accusation.
Experience Alison’s moving poems in Synkroniciti’s November 30th issue, “Space,” Vol. 5, No. 4, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Alison Hicks was awarded the 2021 Birdy Prize from Meadowlark Press for Knowing Is a Branching Trail. Previous collections are You Who Took the Boat Out and Kiss, a chapbook, Falling Dreams, and a novella, Love: A Story of Images. Her work has appeared in Eclipse, Gargoyle, Permafrost, and Poet Lore. She was named a finalist for the 2021 Beullah Roe prize from Smartish Pace, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Green Hills Literary Lantern and Quartet Journal. She is founder of Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which offers community-based writing workshops.